


putting pain in a stranger

by Caracalliope



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Eldritchfuck Roseworld: Ancestors Branch, Gen, Gentleness, Highblood Rages, Monster on the Leash, Mutilation, Rescue, except not really
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:35:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24199825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caracalliope/pseuds/Caracalliope
Summary: The Grand Highblood finds someone he can follow.(loosely connected toshows of vulnerability)
Relationships: Grand Highblood♦Kanaya Maryam, Rose Lalonde & Kanaya Maryam
Comments: 8
Kudos: 18
Collections: EldritchfuckRoseworld, Hurt Comfort Exchange 2020





	putting pain in a stranger

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sheliak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sheliak/gifts).



Ever since the night he dragged himself out of the brooding caverns, Kurloz has had in him a deep understanding of fear. Used to be, he had a love of it too. Highblooded or low, fear tasted like grubwine on his tongue, and for hundreds of sweeps, he revelled in its heavy flavors.

His Old Gods have taken his tongue - a needless and sharp thing he is better to being without. After his righteous mutilation, all the fear around him rose into a flood that he couldn't keep loving. His terrors, past and present, blended with the fear as is drenching this house of Gods, flowing from ten other fools and one martyr. Kurloz learned to fear himself as the fools and martyr once feared him. And so did his chucklevoodoos turn back on him, subjugglating him in ways more intimate than what his Old Gods demand as their due. And so did he lose his earned name. The Old Gods forced him on his knees, changed time around him until his horns grew into the ceiling, making him part of this hive, present and future. Nothing is grand about him now, nothing is high.

It is no way to greet the New Gods. So, Kurloz doesn't.

He doesn't move as the New Gods get their grace and stricture all on up at him. He can't answer their questions with no tongue. There's a joke here in the making, of him spending all his humility on the Old Beasts, and being left with none now he is taken by Gods as want him to serve with more than his nook and his helplessness.

A pair of bony, clawed hands cuts across his mirthless haze. His hair is moved from his face, and brightness floods his oculars.

The wiggler in front of him has bathed in the light of stars. And in her touch, he tastes no fear of him.

"Perhaps you will get better responses from him when he is no longer a part of the building," she says. The New God, standing behind her, _flinches_. The God's hair is bright, but dimmed in his view by the wiggler's skin.

He feels in his bones that the New Gods are beings of fear too. The sourness of it is alien but not so different from his own. But the shiny-bright wiggler carries only gleaming wrath, and his blood sings out in response to it.

"Makara," she says. "Can you hear me?"

Stuck as he is - for how long now? In any other place, he would have died sweeps ago - stuck as he is, there is no miracle as makes it possible for him to nod. Instead, he up and lifts both hands, palms turned upward, a gesture of supplication. The wiggler nods for him, and then she says, "Open your mouth. I won't choke you, I wish to check something."

Her fingers are thorough but they don't get any lingering on. Ancient instincts are of no use here, and tattered they are as much as his trousers. It's no big miracle that he keeps on from biting down on her hand.

"The landlords took his tongue," she says. "You did the same with me in a dream."

"Kanaya -" so speaks the New God, and with her sermon comes a flood of new fear, acrid and unknowable.

"My apologies. I mean your predecessor did. It doesn't matter, Rose, it was only a dream."

Kurloz focuses on the wiggler's wrath. It reminds him of his old life, of sentences passed with no appeal.

He wishes to know what she dreams about, how she can still tell the difference between dreams and reality. Is the temple where she serves so different from this one? When she woke with her tongue still in her mouth, was she grateful or afraid? Or was this shining anger there even then?

"Makara, listen to me," she says. "We will take you somewhere you can rest. But we can't stay here long. Can you pull your horns free? If not, I will have to cut them away."

There is only one response as feels fitting. Kurloz puts both arms behind his back, closes his eyes. He will learn to serve the Gods later, maybe this child will teach him. But he can keep still when she cuts him. He has learned that much here, and more besides.

The whirr of her chainsaw is a new, fresh sound. It drowns out the chucklevoodoos. Then, the pain takes over, and there is freedom in that too.

* * *

_It's no surprise when Kanaya's chainsaw hits live bone tissue. The landlords are watching even now, building new obstacles even as this tendril of reality keeps dissipating. They're not going to let anything happen painlessly._

_Old trolls bleed more slowly, Rose thinks, watching purple run down into Makara's hair. How can he be silent? How can he be smiling?_

_Equius keeps holding Kanaya up, careful and brave, and Kanaya inhales, prepared to cut the other horn. The great clown moves his shoulders, and Rose has her needles in hand. She wouldn't strike to kill, but she will strike if she has to. He wouldn't be the first of the old ones to attack._

_But Kanaya puts a hand on his forehead like she's checking for a fever. It quiets him down, smooths away his dreadful grin. He doesn't move until the second horn is cut away. Then, he slowly lowers himself to the ground, forehead pressing against the floor._

_"Rose," Kanaya says, putting away the chainsaw and applying a new coat of lipstick. The purple on her lips is regal and striking, cold and unnatural. "Give him his orders and do it quickly, please. This room feels like it will close in on us."_

* * *

Makara is not expecting to see her, and his strange face lights up when she enters his respiteblock. Kanaya sees no need to bother with knocking. She wants no part in the niceties that govern her home now. The truth is that Makara has no choice but to see her if that is what Kanaya wants.

... Specifically, what Kanaya wants is to give him a gift.

He keeps his arms behind his back, but he frowns when she kneels down next to him. Understandably, he has shown an aversion to kneeling. This is something Kanaya knows already. Heat floods her face with the realization that going to her knees when she enters a room is a default action now, requiring no more thought than sucking at a fresh wound.

To cover up the shame, she rolls her shoulders and sits with her legs folded neatly in front of her. But driven by some unknowable clown impulse, he lies down on his back in response, stretching out improbably large but thin like a mongoose. One of his incisor fangs is missing, which might be why his grin never feels like a threat.

She hands over her treasures - well, Roxy's, originally. Rose has bought Roxy dozens of 'gel pens', a gift that has heretofore not required repayment. Kanaya chose one in her own color, and one of the ones in Roxy's.

"I thought you may want to give writing another try," she says to Makara. It's an offer, not an order, but she's not sure how well he understands the difference.

When Rose gave him a grubtop he could use to communicate, his claws sank directly through the device. He isn't the only one of their Ancestors to have broken a computer (and in fact, Kanaya herself allegedly destroyed one, before Sollux vowed to install robust antiviruses on everything she touches). But Makara was the only one who laughed - and then he kept laughing, until it turned into booming, dry sobs. She envied his shameless, deeply felt theatricality.

He eyes the pens warily, arms still unmoving.

"Please take one," she says, "or I will feel foolish, which is surely the worst thing a person can feel here. Don't worry. These are more replaceable than a grubtop - anyway, Rose is not here."

The persuasion works. He takes one of the pink pens, holding it between his claw tips rather than his fronds. She hands over a sheet of paper. Those have started appearing around Karkat, almost spontaneously. They all have a faint gray grid.

Makara drags the pen across the paper, draws a glittering line that ends in a spiral. He laughs through his nose. 

"It would be nice to learn your name," Kanaya says. "Eridan insists we should call you Your Excellency, but I try to abstain from absurdity."

Another laugh, but then Makara shakes his head and hands the pen back.

"No? Should we call you Nameless, to go along with Signless?"

He flinches, very slightly. Without letting herself overthink it, she reaches out and smooths his hair back.

"Yes, I agree that matching names are gauche," she says. "But you'll soon need to tell me what your problem is with the Vantases. You must understand - whatever he may have implied, John is not the one who will kill you, if you hurt Karkat or his Ancestor."

Makara bows his head, and he mouths what is almost certainly 'thank you'. She _will_ find out why the Signless scares him almost as much as John and Rose do.

She hands the pen back. "Is there anything you need that you don't have yet?" she asks. She has noticed before that she can go directly from threatening him to offering her help, and his manner around her barely changes. This is not what she has gotten used to, as Rose's favorite. Her friends always trusted her, but that trust would have shattered if she'd shown any taste for power or for violence.

Slowly, painstakingly, he writes down MOTHER FUCKING CHAIR on his piece of paper. 

She frowns. "Rose is already working on that, haven't you been listening? The furniture on this planet is not built to your scale. She explained this to all of you yesterday."

He looks utterly blank. Sometimes, he stops listening when Rose and John are speaking. This would have been unacceptably dangerous before - and not just to him - but Kanaya decides she can let it go for now.

"I meant, is there anything _I_ can get for you? You may keep the pens and paper."

She is hoping he will ask for something possible, like a pen in his color, or different food, or - well, yet more pillows. She has missed this more frivolous kind of caretaking.

Makara writes, scribbles it out, starts writing again. Kanaya leans back on her elbows, lazily recalls what Jane and Roxy told her about the letters written for Human Daddy Christmas. But the joke is a convoluted one, and Makara will not be able to appreciate it for a long time still.

He hands the paper back, rigidly sets his arms back by his sides. The unceasing gestures of surrender are not necessary, but they make it easier to lean over and pat his cheek.

The paper says ~~JOKES~~ STORIES? and she wonders sometimes if she would flee if she knew the full shape of his thoughts. But then, it might just be the most natural thing in the world, to wish to learn more about where he is now and what he is expected to live up to.

"All our most dramatic storytellers were stuck on the John side of things," she says, "but here's something Nepeta told us about a quarry she once pursued, in which a young huntress stumbles first into danger and then into the moiraillegiance of a lifetime. You will forgive me for removing the puns and making up details for romantic effect."

Makara watches with wide eyes, in complete silence and stillness. He has his own preconceptions about her but he is willing to be corrected. In his block, Kanaya can invent herself anew.

"The story begins in a forest. I think that's a good setting for romance, darker than my desert, more alive than the sea..."

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from Sweet Thing, which is what I listened to on repeat while writing!
> 
> But, full disclosure, the working title was "motherfucking miracles", which is what this paleship is called in my heart.


End file.
